This my friends is good. Perhaps formulaic and cynical (the Guardian mentioned Rick Rubin, which is kind of obvious) but that doesn’t take anything away. Totally Utah Phillips.
I’m involved in organizing a screening of Age of Stupid next Saturday 22nd August. 8pm.
Here’s the official blurb:
The Age of Stupid is the new four-year epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? MORE
If you can come please do, it’s free in, we’ll have a cheap bar and the movie itself shouldn’t be missed.
It’s taking place on the roof of The Printworks, Ashwin St, Dalston (E8 3DL) and it will look something like this:
Mark Leckey’s “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore” is a trip down memory lane for anyone who has every got dressed up to go out and regretted it when they’ve seen the photos. And it should be compulsory viewing for 16 year-olds; this is how ridiculous you’re going to look in 10 years.
There’s a loose chronology – northern soul, soul weekenders, casuals, acid house – but the two defining themes of the film are timeless.
Firstly, what deeply strange places nightclubs are; hundreds of strangers, all as high as kites, crammed together in a deliberately disorientating space. And secondly, how much poignancy there is in something ostensibly celebratory; the idea that “the best days of your lives” will be wiped away by a change in fashion.
I attended a NESTA related screening of Us Now, last week. Despite featuring George Osbourne and Ed Milliband it presented a pretty optimistic vision of a future-present in terms of “the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet”.
Here’s the feedback, collated by hand on paper handouts. Kind of old school for a documentary about collaborative networks. Mine’s on slide 10 I think.
A screening of McCall and Andrew Tyndall’s feature-length film
Argument, followed by a presentation by artist Aurélien Froment, whose
work deals with archives and film as a metaphor. Argument is a dense
and provocative feature-length essay examining one issue of the New
York Times magazine to investigate the ideology of news, the language
of fashion and the construction of masculinity.